Friday, January 31, 2014

Letter From Brooklyn - Jacob Scheier

Jacob Scheier's second book of poetry, Letter From Brooklyn, is flat out brilliant.

These poems read like missives from a wise old sage with a healthy sense of humour and a good library, a poet who might be a character in a book by Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins, who in fact turns out to be young and in the know, in the now.

The World-Changing Business

"When I asked her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist

Party...(s)he says: "Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were

in the world-changing business. You can't get much better than that."

-Vivian Gornick (Interviewing Maggie McConnel),

The Romance of American Communism

The world-changing business

was the family business. My father

took me to the storefront at the edge of history,

saying one day all this will be yours.

But our store was the world and it wasn't

supposed to belong to anyone

or it was supposed to belong to all of us.

I didn't understand it either.

For the world already was that way

when I was a child. The way of owning nothing.

I thought the business was to make us all

children one day. Yet childhood

was disappointing. The first time

my father said we were going to a demo

I expected to see wrecking balls

spoon brick and stone. But people just stood,

or walked, or spoke, sometimes of wrecking things—

though no one ever did. My father often spoke

about the world that could be.

Should be. Would be.

I was to inherit this business

of not yet and now and always.

We lived in the future I would build one day,

though I wanted more to be a garbage man.

My father would have preferred that

to what I am doing right now.

...

Scheier's poetry is a narrative poetry lovers' dream and right up my aisle. Even better, Scheier is one of those writers you just know could tell you the story of the phonebook with humour, guile and insight. These poems aren't flashy but they are rock solid, there are no fireworks but instead a furnace, a foundry, a foundation so solid you could build on top of these poems.

Biking Down a Country Road

In South-Western Manitoba.

The bales are fat as boulders.

At your back, the hill of silos and the feed factory—

red as the sun in The Grapes of Wrath, the book

you stayed up half the night reading

that made you understand something

about your father. Life settles like dust

inside some men. And the train tracks you passed,

three and a half miles back, must not depart

much from the ones his brother lay upon

decades before, as though he were

a coin, and the bridge you passed

an hour ago isn't that different from the one

his niece leaped from last week, drifting

like something stirred from a field.

And the sky above the prairie is pink

as the pills your mother popped,

making her belly a salmon-filled river.

Before you the dry land is still a frozen river.

You hear your father's voice

on the phone, last night, telling you

what happened to your cousin. Hear

his breath push the dust

when she says he wants things to be

different while there is still time,

as though he has found a track

to lay your life upon while you wait

for the train to change its shapes.

As he speaks you fear that he might breathe

his dust into you. Or that he already has.

The flies rise from the roadside marshes

in the fading yellow of the day, and pelt

your helmet like sheets of rain.

You are far enough down this road

to no longer see the lights of town.

It is so flat you see the precise point

where you see no further. You stop and stare

into the limits of your sight, glad to be alone.

If someone else were here, they might ask

what you're looking. And what

could you say? You'd say

"nothing" and look away,

as you look away now

at the nothing all around

and crowding in.

...

When a poet is as confident and assured as Scheier is in these pages there is a flow and naturalness to it all. As conversational as it may appear to be there is delicate weaving taking place, these poems are like perfect little movies of our lives.

Elegy For Teenage Love

How did we not know it would be so quick

and irrevocable. Our love

of broken snow globes. Of spilled

water and plastic flakes. Of curved glass

jagged in your hands. Of light

held to your wrist like you were

holding your breath. Our breath. We held

the certainty that is the provenance of the young

who know grief a little earlier than they should.

We were hardened alchemists, transformed wise

from hurt. We knew our love was

everything. We hid inside its immense pocket

and it was hard to tell if it might be larger

than our lives or if we just grew very small

inside it. We could not have stayed together like that

and lived. But we compromised, being together

till we ruined ourselves, just a little,

just enough, to extinguish what permitted us

to love that way. We didn't know

we were kind. We knew

we weren't beautiful but we were young

and beautiful for that.

...

I am utterly sold and smitten with Jacob Scheier's Letter From Brooklyn, it may be the best book of poetry I read this year.

Nature

Easily startled

by how her voice carries

over water. His ears perk

and his head rises.

She is close now,

having paddled deep

into the bulrushes

to find him. He stares,

then lowers his head

to let her know

if she gets any closer

he will charge.

...

When I open a book of poems I am hoping for any number of joys to be present, Scheier runs the gamut. Letter From Brooklyn is intelligent, entertaining and very humane poetry of the highest order. Full stop.